


"Not Otherwise Specified"

by SincerelyChaos



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Based on the Books seen at 221B, Character Study, Developing Relationship, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Not canon compliant after Reichenbach, Psychology, Sherlock-centric, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-07
Updated: 2017-03-16
Packaged: 2018-09-15 14:11:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 11,706
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9238460
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SincerelyChaos/pseuds/SincerelyChaos
Summary: Solving a problem before you've managed to define the problem itself often proves to be difficult.Unfortunately, the problem beingNot Otherwise Specifieddoesn't help.





	1. Psychiatry To-Day

**Author's Note:**

> In 221B, as explored with Google Maps, there are no less than four textbooks on psychiatry and psychotherapy visible in the bookshelves.
> 
> This is a story about how these books ended up in 221B. Or rather, it is four different stories, one for each of the four books, following Sherlock from the age 12 to mid-canon. 
> 
> Note that author has not read any of the books here mentioned. Author has read many similar books, but these particular books have only been looked up online, and therefore author claims that some artistic license will be forthcoming.
> 
> pennypaperbrain is the beta behind this and my constant source of inspiration on Sherlock whump.
> 
> Lastly; don't forget to heed the tags and individual chapter warnings.

 

 

“You’ve read all these?” John asks and nods at the seemingly endless supply of haphazardly placed books that already covers most surfaces in 221B.

“No, I mostly use them to press flowers in… Of course I read them! What else would be the purpose of having them?”

Sherlock is aware that this probably came out sounding more testy than intended, but the state of the flat is still somewhat of a sore subject for him. It’s only been a week since John came to look at the flat and declared that the place would be very nice once all the rubbish had been cleaned up, and Sherlock is yet to make an effort to actually do something about it. There is, after all, nothing wrong with 221B. In fact, it’s the only place that Sherlock’s ever lived that has even the potential to be anything more than ‘tolerable’.

“How did you get all these?” John wonders, clearly ignoring Sherlock’s peevishness. “‘A Beginner’s Guide to Airsports’? And this… ‘Psychiatry To-Day’. I mean, ‘To-Day’? It’s from… 1952!”

John is amused, and while it was obvious when they met that feelings of anything bordering on amusement were something John hadn’t experienced for quite some time, Sherlock has seen no less than 19 different expressions of mirth in the past eight days.

(That he’s also observed at least 29 different variations on exasperation is beside the point.)

“Yes, there might be a few passages that are moderately outdated in that particular book,” Sherlock distractedly acknowledges.

“You do know that they’re not currently treating anyone by inducing insulin coma, don’t you?” John inquires, his voice perfectly serious. “But seeing as you also have a phrenology poster on the floor next to our sink, your knowledge on this particular field of science might be in need of a a brush-up.”

“‘Science’,” Sherlock huffs. “I’d hardly qualify the so-called findings of this particular field as ‘science’.

After all, fields which Sherlock considers as ‘scientific’ are those that have from time to time been able to provide him with some at least moderately useful answers of a fairly definitive and consistent nature.

Possible answers gained from the field of psychiatry, on the other hand, have so far failed to be either definitive or consistent.

Or indeed comprehensible.

 

* * *

 

 

Sherlock is twelve when he takes the book from the child psychiatrist’s office.

It’s not the first time he’s been to a psychiatrist, but it’s the first time that Mummy doesn’t protest or drag him out of there before the evaluation has even begun, tight-lipped as she apologised to him for having given into his teacher’s plea to have him tested. After that first time, when Mummy sat silently beside him, not arguing with the psychiatrist even as the questions became more and more ludicrous, Sherlock declared that he would only agree to attend the next appointment if she wasn’t in the room with him. He’d gotten his way without much of a fight, which was perhaps the most worrying thing in this whole business.

On his way out from his second appointment with the child psychiatrist with the yellow teeth and the questionable hang-up on Sherlock’s relationship with his own mother, Sherlock decides that if there is in fact something wrong with him, then he ought to be the first to know, not the psychiatrist. He should at least get the chance to be on slightly more even ground with the so-called professional if they are to keep discussing his ‘developmental delays’ and ‘oppositional behaviours’. He grabs the first book he sees on the nearest shelf that has ‘psychiatry’ in the title and puts it in his school bag as he follows the nicotine addict out of the office.

When he gets home, he locks himself in his room. “Psychiatry To-Day’ seems somewhat promising, until Sherlock opens it and notices that the book was printed in 1952. Thinking that the human brain certainly couldn’t have developed in any significant way in three decades, he continues to read.

After finishing the last page, Sherlock unceremoniously throws the book at the wall, hoping that its spine will crack and all the hateful, patronising drivel written in incomprehensible medical jargon will be smashed as it falls to the floor.

Sherlock returns to the psychiatrist for his next appointment, but by then he’s already made up his mind. If there is something wrong with him, then he doesn’t see the point in finding out what that is. If he were found to be mentally ill, then his future would be on a par with that of a leper, and Sherlock has enough things going against him as it is. Therefore, he spends the next three sessions not saying a word, and eventually Mummy puts a stop to the project all together.

Sherlock knows that there’s something wrong with him, not only because he’s incessantly reminded of it as soon as he leaves his home and even his mother had ceased to protest the constant urgings to get Sherlock evaluated (which, in the end, didn’t matter when Sherlock himself didn’t chose to ‘cooperate’), but because he’s always suspected as much.

The blue Pelican paperback, thought it remains on his floor for several weeks, can neither confirm nor dismiss what Sherlock knows to be true.

Psychiatry, thinks Sherlock, is a sad excuse for a medical speciality.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The psychiatry textbooks of 221B; http://sincerely-chaos.tumblr.com/post/155495947321/psychiatry-textbooks-in-221b
> 
> Psychiatry To-Day; https://www.amazon.co.uk/Psychiatry-Pelican-books-David-Stafford-Clark/dp/B0000CIC3B


	2. New Oxford Textbook of Psychiatry

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, pennypaperbrain makes my Swinglish (Swedish-English) words into real English ones, and also makes me reflect on the maelstrom of words that my texts consist of, making them clearer.
> 
> For details on my choice of diagnostic framework in this chapter, see end note.
> 
> Also, keep in mind; this is not me trying to diagnose Sherlock. This a is a story in which Sherlock attempts diagnosing himself.

 

 

“She must have some kind of delusional psychosis,” John says.

It’s just before noon, and the kitchen of 221B is vaguely lit up by the cloudy grey day outside. Last night they wrapped up a case, but it wasn’t the case in itself that was the topic for discussion - it was the woman who had rented a room to the victim.

Sherlock is distracted by the way light catches John’s hands, creating shadows between knuckles and tendons as he grabs the box of Weetabix and opens the plastic wrapping of one tube. It shouldn’t be distracting.

After six months of living together, Sherlock finds that it very much is.

“Don’t be absurd - did you see the state of that woman’s kitchen? She has at least five rare and high-maintenance plants which would not have survived the episodes of negative symptoms during which I doubt she’d been able to supply the level of care they need in order to thrive, yet they’d clearly been there for several years. There were no medications in the house except for herbs, and while her reasoning over the death of her tenant might seem somewhat paranoid, I doubt that a man like our victim would share a house with a woman with an ongoing paranoid psychosis without attempting to get her to see some medical professionals.”

“How do you know that he didn’t?”

“The way she spoke about him. Not the way you speak about someone who’s tried to tell you that you are losing your grip on reality and ought to seek medical attention from the NHS; especially not if you’re having paranoid delusions.”

“So why was she on about how the death of her tenant had upset the balance in her home and the way our presence ‘only served to further upset the spirit of him’?”

“Possibly a schizotypal personality disorder. Judging by the state of her books on the topics of clairvoyance and spirits, these interests are not recent, but date back at least two decades. The older photos on the south wall of the living room suggests that she had somewhat of an unusual personality even as a child, which is consistent with a personality disorder rather than schizophrenia, which typically manifests when someone is in their early twenties.”

“But the way she talked; it was almost incomprehensible at times?” John inserts.

“Unusual patterns of speaking or rambling is not uncommon in schizotypal personality disorder.”

“Is that so?” John asks after a few seconds of silence. “And how come you of all people know this? I thought you said that ‘human nature’ wasn’t exactly your area?”

“I did not!” Sherlock protests, but there’s something vaguely familiar to the words, so John is most likely right. It sounds like something he’d say when he wanted John to just shut up about other people’s feelings. “A vast amount of my work is based on others being predictable in their… human nature. Knowing about it and bothering with it is hardly the same thing.”

“Psychiatric diagnostics?” John asks, clearly amused. Sherlock fails to see where the humour lies.

“Yes, certain pathological patterns are important to factor in when it comes to the behaviours most likely to present themselves amongst clients and suspects, as evident from this entire conversation.”

“Huh,” John says. “I recall you said something about how how psychiatry doesn’t deserve to be called ‘science’.”

That conversation Sherlock does remember, because John finding the worn copy of Psychiatry To-Day on the shelf next to the window reminded Sherlock to put his other books on the subject away amongst some of the other things he keeps in an old cupboard in his own room. The easiest way to avoid questions you have no particular desire to answer to is not to give rise to them in the first place, after all.

“It doesn’t. It’s imprecise, and its reliability when it comes to actual diagnoses is hardly up to the standard of most other medical fields. That does not mean that I don’t find the patterns observed or the descriptions offered to be useful.”

“So basically, you won’t acknowledge it as a science, but you’re happy to make use of it anyway?”

“Fair enough,” Sherlock allows.

 

* * *

 

When Sherlock is eighteen years old he decides to give psychiatry one more chance.

He's spent his teenage years being resigned to the fact that he's suffering from an unfortunate combination of being gifted with a massive intellect while also being burdened by an abrasive personality. It was a simplified and insufficient conclusion, cracking around the edges, but he held onto it as the only way he could find any respite from the constant feeling that there was something more going on. The alternative was unacceptable; that there could be something obfuscated or pathological residing inside his own mind that he could neither understand nor define.

It’s during the end of his second semester at uni that his previously adopted standpoint in the matter proves to be so inadequate as to force him to address the possibility of other explanations for his troubles with living.

In short: there has to be something wrong with him, because if there isn't - if this is how he’s supposed to feel, if this is as good as it will get - then he might as well end it all once and for all.

After having spent two days in an intensive care unit followed by several more at a respiratory unit after having inhaled an almost lethal amount of toxic smoke when an experiment had gone wrong (well, ‘gone wrong’ if staying alive had been his priority), Sherlock’s lungs are in no state for smoking, but given that they’ve survived thus far, he’s willing to risk it.

(He doesn’t even consider it a risk anymore, and that’s the problem, isn’t it? Because it can hardly be considered to be a ‘risk’ if there’s nothing to lose.)

Sherlock lights a cigarette as he opens the thick textbook that he ordered once he finally had the strength to argue his way to a discharge from the hospital.

The “New Oxford Textbook of Psychiatry” turns out to be a clear improvement over the old, stolen paperback from his earlier run-ins with psychiatry. For one thing, it's the current edition and should therefore have been updated to include the latest findings, although findings are not what he’s after.

What he is looking for is criteria. Because if Sherlock can find a plausible explanation - preferably something suitably organic that could be confirmed by neuroscientific findings and is in addition manageable through chemical intervention - then perhaps he can gain an ounce of control over what's now controlling him.

Sherlock approaches this the way he approaches anything he fails to understand - by reading.

One by one, Sherlock works his way through the different diagnoses.

It takes him several days. He ignores lectures, loses sleep, and manages to upset his stomach more than usual with the tension caused by the problem at hand in addition to the excessive drinking of coffee and smoking of cigarettes.At least the cigarettes cover up the lingering smell of unwashed clothing and unaired room. Sherlock finds that it’s almost a relief, completely losing himself in a problem once more after all those months of not finding anything that seemed worth his attention, mostly staring at the flaky ceiling.

This is the puzzle that needs a solution if he’s going to live long enough to tackle many others.

Sherlock decides on a methodical approach to the problem, starting by sorting the main categories of disorders into the categories of ‘possible’ or ‘unlikely’.

Ruling out the most unlikely disorders turns out to be the easiest part. Delirium, dementia, substance-related disorders, psychotic disorders, somatoform disorders and sexual and gender identity disorders are immediately discarded, as well as some other broader categories that hardly seems to apply to him.

Certain categories, such as sleeping disorders, eating disorders and anxiety disorders do seem to have some merit, but none of those strike him as what the DSM calls ‘the primary diagnosis’. They are more likely secondary to another disorder, as they in themselves fail to account for most of the areas in which he suspects there might be… issues.

(Sherlock does not particularly enjoy the notion of having ‘issues’, but sitting with a psychiatry textbook resting against his knees, wearing the clothes he put on three days ago and trying to figure out what’s wrong with him as an attempt to decide if it’s worth continuing, he concludes that he’s in no position to be too be particular about linguistics.)

It’s tempting to immediately rule out the seemingly paradoxical “Disorders usually first diagnosed in infancy, childhood or adolescence” category, not only because, whatever he might have, it hasn’t been diagnosed yet and he’s nearing the end of his adolescence, but also because it includes some of the more offensive diagnoses suggested by the incompetent psychiatrists of his childhood. “Development disorder”... Already at age nine, the mere idea of having such thing had made him throw some of his more vile insults at the face of the chain-smoking excuse for a psychiatrist who had mentioned the possibility to his mother. Still, Sherlock requires more rigorous criteria than instinctive response alone, so he sets the category aside while sorting the rest of the more likely disorders.

There’s no point in being delicate about one’s possible psychopathologies, he reasons.

At the end of his first night of reading, Sherlock is left with said category as well as mood disorders, depressive disorders, bipolar disorders and personality disorders, all of which he will have to go through more thoroughly in order to eliminate each individual diagnosis until he finds something that seems to have at least moderate merit.

Letting the books fall to the floor, Sherlock stretches out and makes his way to the kitchenette, in dire need of more coffee.

A new distraction. For the first time in weeks, the smell of the old dishes doesn’t even bother him.

 

* 

 

Sherlock was thirteen when he realised that the feeling of being out of place, of the world being full of people just reading from the same, inane script whenever they interacted, and the mere hopelessness of it all were not universal. He’d thought that while most people were better at simply disregarding the notion and carrying on with their lives, these experiences were - unlike his boredom and his impossibly bright mind - shared by all humans.

The realisation that they weren’t did nothing to improve matters.

 

*

 

Working his way through each and every diagnosis in the categories that he’s deemed ‘possible’, a most annoying pattern emerges.

While he doesn’t meet enough of the criteria for any individual diagnosis, he does - arguably - meet the criteria for most of the Not Otherwise Specified diagnoses in each of the categories.

In the end, after having put aside several diagnoses which he can agree have merit, but which fail to account for most of his major issues, Sherlock is left with three candidates, two of which are not possible to treat with any kind of medical intervention and are therefore useless by his standards.

Mood disorder NOS, personality disorder NOS and - to Sherlock’s great annoyance - pervasive development disorder NOS.

Whatever Sherlock has - whatever Sherlock is - it is _not otherwise specified_ _,_ which feels like a direct insult, as Sherlock’s always been careful to be nothing but specific.

It also seems like he won’t be able to either confirm or rule out any of these disorders, as the interpretation of the criteria blatantly fails to take his superior intellect and his lifelong ability to temporarily adjust or mask some of his issues into account.

On the whole, Sherlock finds that the whole diagnostic framework is a simplified filing system that can only be considered applicable to people of moderate intelligence or below, presenting with only one or two disorders and possessing no ability to compensate for said issues.

Sherlock goes to the bathroom, returns, and looks at the textbook as it waits for him on his unmade and unslept-in bed; and suddenly it’s all too much. Days and days of reading these unspecific, subjective and ludicrous criteria, and all he gets is several possible diagnoses of ‘not otherwise specified’ pathologies.

The book lands with a ‘thump’ as he shovels it off his bed, deciding to let all this fucking pointlessness just wash over him like it always threatens to do.

He can attempt to get back to the matter once the lump that’s currently making it hard to swallow has dissolved itself.

(It’s not disappointment, because surely disappointment requires there to have initially been some kind of hope?)

 

 

Before he has the chance to go through the textbook once more, attempting to find what he must have missed, that one detail that will explain everything and enable him to finally understand what it is that makes every part of his life seem to be out of tune with his surroundings and even with himself, Sherlock is distracted by looking for an answer elsewhere.

For the first time in his life, he finds it.

Cocaine, as it turns out, renders ‘understanding’ irrelevant.

 

*

 

The knowledge he’s gained from his fruitless attempts at diagnosing himself does, however, prove to be useful when Sherlock is admitted to rehab.

During his first - brief - admission, he’s in no state to participate in any kind of psychiatric evaluation. On his second admission Sherlock efficiently manages to circumvent any attempt at diagnosing his ‘underlying condition’ in order to address the issue of ‘possible self-medication’ by rattling off all the criteria he doesn’t meet for each and every diagnosis that he’s being evaluated for. He proceeds to refuse participation in any of the diagnostic interviews with reference to the significant variations in reliability that such assessments have shown in different studies. No further attempts at diagnostics are initiated.

The mere idea that some moderately intelligent professional could find an answer to a question that Sherlock Holmes himself has failed to answer is absurd.

As Sherlock leaves rehab for the second time, it is with only one diagnosis: F19.23 - Other psychoactive substance dependence with withdrawal. Sherlock finds that, as far as validity goes, he has no objections to said diagnosis, given the the psychical and psychological symptoms he's had the misfortune of experiencing during his stay.

Two months after his discharge from the facility, Sherlock finds that the answers he needs at that point to handle the (neurochemically unavoidable) complication of his one and only diagnosed condition are most likely found in the field of suicidology.

When the major depression caused by his neurotransmitters readjusting themselves to the lack of various drugs finally begins to wear off, Sherlock finds himself a new and rather effective way of ridding himself of the last persistent symptoms of his depression.

Visiting crime scenes, solving riddles, catching murderers and finding patterns in the battlefield that is his London, Sherlock is, for the first time in his life, not too bothered by his own mind.

It’s almost enough.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Regarding diagnostic framework; For the substance disorder, ICD is used due to it being the most likely system to be applied at that time, when Sherlock researches the diagnoses, I've chosen to use DSM-IV due to it being included in the book (according to some online reviews), and because that's the diagnostic manual I'm most familiar with.
> 
> Pervasive Development Disorder - in DSM IV, this category held diagnoses like Autism and Asperger's syndrome. The NOS diagnose is similar in many ways to these two diagnoses, but primarily Asperger's.


	3. Suicidology and Suicide Prevention

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Since I don’t have access to [the book that’s seen in 221B](http://sincerely-chaos.tumblr.com/post/155495947321/psychiatry-textbooks-in-221b), I have based all the references to the content of said book on that of a somewhat similar book, the 2005 edition of “Assessment, Treatment and Prevention of Suicidal Behaviour” by Yulit and Lester, which was published four years earlier than [the book in Sherlock’s bookcase](https://books.google.se/books/about/Oxford_Textbook_of_Suicidology_and_Suici.html?id=LXkbAQAAMAAJ&source=kp_cover&redir_esc=y&hl=sv) in 221B. 
> 
> There might be medical inaccuracies hiding in here. If you spot one, please tell me. I do so love medically accurate stories, but unfortunately the medical settings/aspects mentioned in this chapter - lungs, airways and intensive care units - are 'not my division', my division being the same as that of the books in Sherlock's shelves.
> 
> Trigger warnings; this is a chapter about suicide/suicidal ideation. Additional warnings for substance abuse, mental health issues and minor violence.
> 
> [pennypaperbrain](http://archiveofourown.org/users/pennypaperbrain/pseuds/pennypaperbrain) is the reason this chapter is finally seeing the light of day, and also the reason it makes any kind of sense to anyone but my own chaotic self. Additionally, her taking me to see Oxford a few weeks ago significantly shaped one of the scenes in this chapter...
> 
> ***
> 
> So we trade liquor for blood in an attempt to tip the scales  
>  I think you lost what you loved in that mess of details  
>  They seemed so important at the time  
>  But now you can't even recall any of the names, faces, or lines  
>  It's more the feeling of it all  
>  Well, winter is going to end, I'm going to clean these veins again  
>  So close to dying that I finally can start living
> 
> _\- An Attempt to Tip the Scales_ by Bright Eyes -

 

 

“I wouldn’t do it tonight.”

The informant’s eyes widen for a moment before he resumes his neutral expression. He scans Sherlock's face for a few seconds, then he sighs and looks away.

Sherlock gets up from his chair and John follows, who is most likely eager to get out of the overly warm little diner and get on with the chase.

“How did you know?” The man still seated at the table asks, tonelessly. His name is Steven and he's the middleman in several illegal networks that specialise in stolen cars. Sherlock's used him as an informant on several occasions over the years. Tonight he’s given Sherlock enough information to take down at least four bigger players much further up the criminal network, where there were a lot more than stolen property at stake.

“I didn't, but you just confirmed it,” says Sherlock, resting his hands on the back of the chair he's just vacated.

“Why not tonight?”

“Why tonight?”

“I've made up my mind.”

“Great. Then a few days’ delay won't make much of a difference anyway. Talk to someone. Your companion should get an explanation. He considers you his best friend and he’ll be the one who finds you.”

George, Steven’s accomplice, had been around the car dealership on two occasions when Sherlock had been there looking for Steven. The middle-aged man had been the one who got Steven into the business, and likely the only person Steven had told about the twelve-year-old son he was no longer allowed to see and the years of homelessness after the divorce.

“Why would I do that to him?”

“Do what?” John asks, and Sherlock knows that John has understood what this is all about, but is willfully playing ignorant.

Steven looks down at the basket of ketchup and pepper on the table.

“Never mind,” he says after a few seconds, getting ready to put on his coat.

“Your choice. Though I’m not going to use the information you’ve given me,” Sherlock says, turning around towards the door, catching John’s surprised face in the corner of his eye.

“What? Why?” Steven demands, stopping in the midst of pulling on his coat sleeve.

“Considering that you’re the only one who has had access to some of this information, it’d be like signing your death certificate, and since your son is soon going to be old enough to decide if he wants to see you I figured that even that depressing little flat of yours is a better place for that than a graveyard.”

“Why would my son want to see me?” Steven asks, defeated, like all the air’s gone out of him.

“Oh, please,” Sherlock sighs. “You’ll let him test drive cars in deserted car parks and use all your time and energy to make up for the time lost, of course he’ll want that. What twelve-year-old with an overprotective mother wouldn’t?”

With that, Sherlock nods his goodbye and strides towards the exit.

Still staring at the ketchup, Steven’s knuckles whiten as he holds on to the edge of the table, breathing.

 

*

 

“Is his kid really going to want to see him?” John asks after they’ve walked in silence for several minutes, the heavy traffic in the street almost drowning out his voice.

“How would I know?” Sherlock shrugs, too occupied with his phone, trying to find other contacts that can provide him with additional information in order to enable him to find an alternative way to take down the four leaders of the network.

“But you said…”

“Well, I can’t know, can I? So clearly, neither can he. It’d be idiotic of him not to hang around to find out.”

“How did you know?”

“About the kid?”

“No, about the-- about his plans.”

“As I said; offering up that kind of information is clearly going to shorten his life expectancy quite drastically.”

“And what if the kid doesn’t want to see him?”

“He’ll just have to live to find out.”

 

* * *

 

 

Sherlock is twenty-two when he first encounters the field of suicidology.

It’s not a particularly pleasant encounter, what with the withdrawal surging through his body and his mind feeling like it’s crawling with ants - fire ants - and what with being back in rehab, ambivalent but basically out of other options for the time being.

“Have you ever attempted suicide before?”

Sherlock looks up, taken aback by the words directed at him by the woman sitting opposite him. She's wiggling her left foot as she talks, and it's almost as annoying as her question.

It’s the first thing she’s said to him since she greeted him and asked him to take a seat in her office.

“Before?” Sherlock says, aiming for sniffy but ending up just sounding questioning.

“You’re a chemist. Or, you are on your way to becoming a chemist. And I see that you’re also a proper genius according to the childhood evaluations,” she says, flipping through her notes in a battered pad.

Sherlock waits.

“It’s not like you didn’t know what that dosage and combination would lead to,” she concludes, her foot still wiggling. Sherlock wants to reach out and grab it until she keeps it still.

“I was high.”

“Undoubtedly.”

The movement of her foot slows down during the silence that stretches between them, but then picks up again as she opens her mouth to speak once more.

“So I repeat my question; have you tried to kill yourself before?”

*

 

It's a balancing act.

Sherlock's feet are steady on the railing, but one single misstep and there'd be nothing between him and the stream below.

Would it kill him?

Sherlock is unable to determine that. And it's that uncertainty that makes him take one more step, then another one.

He doesn't feel heavy like this.

His left foot slides an inch on the railing. Beneath him, the stream is loud enough to drown out the thrumming of his heart, sweat breaking out all over his body. For a moment, everything sways before Sherlock manages to regain his balance, the surge in his stomach making shivers run through him at the sight of the water below.

Carl Powers died in the water. Would it be ironic if the only person who was smart enough to realise that it was murder was also found dead in the water?

(No one believes him anyway, no one that matters, at least. Maybe they'd believe him once they'd found his body in the water too? They'd not be clever enough to determine if Sherlock's been murdered too.)

No one believes Sherlock, and Sherlock is powerless, because he's twelve years old and everything hurts so fucking bad.

They don't even listen to logic.

No one listens to him and if they do, they fail to understand him anyway.

It's lonely, and he's tired of trying to keep his balance.

 

 

Another kind of balancing act: trying to live in the in-between.

The in-between is the time between the end of one obsession and the start of something else that’s captivating enough to drown out some of the noise.

Sherlock hates the in-betweens, but he’s been reliably and repeatedly informed that life can’t always be exciting and interesting just because he wants it to be. Unfortunately, this information does not make it any easier to cope when everything goes grey.

Sherlock concludes early on that “living” isn't one of the things in which he's naturally gifted.

 

 *

 

Sherlock is fourteen years old and something in his brain finally takes the plunge.

He's balancing history books on his head, a sharp focus that shatters as they fall to the floor. Victor laughs and so Sherlock laughs, everything pressing up inside him, forcing it out. A restless bubbling in his mind distorts the sounds and for a moment Sherlock can hear Flight of the Bumble Bee in their shared laughter.

“If we leave now I might be able to grab us two fags from Mum's coat,” Victor says, and so they leave Victor’s room and Sherlock thinks that the dark, narrow corridor in the little flat is getting smaller by the second. alls don't really move, but the impression makes Sherlock feel heavy again. The dusty school photos on the walls make the passage of time so clear, and the line of photos ends abruptly after one where Victor looks like he's ten years old. Four years ago. Like time had stopped and Victor never got older than that. Like it's a creature of his imagination that walks before Sherlock towards the hallway, still chuckling.

Sherlock has stopped laughing. Instead, his eyes find the tiny window that faces an identical block of flats and thinks about how birds don’t understand the concept of glass.

He found a finch on the ground below a window once when he was nine. It looked like it had just decided to have a rest, but birds don't lie on their side on the pavement, so Sherlock wanted to take it home and examine it, to find out what was broken.  He didn’t, because that was the kind of thing that made Mycroft say ‘There are reasons they send you to psych doctors, you know.’’

Sherlock hadn’t known that. He had never understood why people thought death to be disturbing.

Death is inevitable. That's all there is to it. A clock ticking for every one of us until it stops.

(Birds don’t understand the concept of glass.)

Victor nicks two cigarettes from his mother's pack, grinning at Sherlock, and Sherlock grins back, because he doesn't know what else to do to avoid letting on that all the giddiness from moments ago has died like a finch that hit a townhouse window five years ago.

They take the stairs, walk past the playground outside and find a bike shed. Sherlock takes a drag on the cigarette Victor hands him, and he hates the taste but he is beginning to find that smoking leads to some rather enjoyable chemical reactions in his brain. He needs that right now.

(Sherlock doesn't understand the concept of balance.)

“Will you be back in school next week?”

Sherlock won’t. He thinks he might never be, but there’s no point getting into that.

“Dull,” he simply says, as Victor passes the cigarette. When their fingers brush, he briefly wonders what it would feel like if something else were to brush against his skin. A press of lips, more skin, the tip of a burning cigarette--

“Yeah, but you'll have more to catch up on if you are gone longer,” Victor reasons, and right then, Sherlock realises that Victor understands nothing.

“You do realise that I'm already done with most of the term?”

“Just rub it in, won't you?” Victor says, but his voice lacks venom.

Victor has a half-decent intellect and an ability to take things at face value and run with them.  Sherlock himself has just spent three weeks in bed, lacking the energy to do anything, but buffeted by the whirlwind of thoughts. All he could do was lie there while all his remarkable ability to observe and dissect turned inwards instead of outwards.

It is not a pleasant thing to have one’s insides inspected too closely, Sherlock has come to realise. Most of the things that he sees in himself as the hours turn into days are petty, useless and downright absurd. There’s nothing brilliant about his mind, not when he is unable to do something useful with it.

Just when the urge to make the circle of his own thoughts turn off once and for all had begun to eat at him almost as much as the thoughts themselves, things began shifting. For the past few days, Sherlock has constantly been somewhere on a scale between an intense sparkling and the sudden downfalls.

It’s both invigorating and excruciating. Perhaps this is where his brain finally breaks, Sherlock thinks, looking sideways at Victor, wondering what would happen if he said this out loud. Instead, he says, “We could pay the idiot down on the third floor to buy us smokes.”

“He’s creepy. Wouldn’t want to go over there every time.”

Sherlock grunts. Actually, the man is harmless - Sherlock is good at judging such things, because it takes one freak to know another. What would it be like to live on the safe side of the line that others are so sure of, but he can’t seem to find?

It was on a pavement similar to this that Sherlock found the finch, and he remembers thinking that, if you have to fly into a window and die, it's doubly unfortunate for it to happen in such a dull place.

He can't fly into a window, but he could attempt to fly out of one, he thinks, picturing the ground approaching faster than it ever has done in his life, and of the finality of such a flight, and suddenly it's hard not to smile; a reverse version of the death of a finch. That would make up for not having gotten to examine the bird. This would be so much more explorative.

“What's so funny?” Victor asks as he sees Sherlock's grin.

“That this place is so dull that not even a dead body could make it interesting,” Sherlock says, now turning to Victor, his smile refusing to leave his mouth.

The thought of flying seems to be something that others connect with possibilities, and Sherlock now sees why.

 

*

 

Annoying as it is, Sherlock has to admit that people were right about university. It's better.

Making his way down the cobbled alley that runs along the side of  his college, Sherlock has to mind his steps since it’s almost pitch dark where the glow of the streetlights doesn’t reach. It’s later than he’d realised, but it doesn’t matter, because Sherlock won’t sleep anyway, and kebab van on St Giles’ will still be there as long as students keep passing on their way home from other colleges or the surrounding pubs.

There's giggles and shouting coming from Museum Road, and Sherlock wonders if the party he was invited to is still ongoing. Most likely, since all the chemistry students in his year have just completed one of their biggest exams and there won't be any lectures tomorrow. That makes for a night of celebration, but then there's little about what other students consider ‘celebratory’ that Sherlock finds even remotely bearable.

He's tried it a few times, because it was something new. Unfortunately, even Oxford’s brightest get rather dim when exposed to alcohol. The parties made for a few interesting experiments in pretending to be normal long enough to pull someone, but their inebriation made them unbearable even to Sherlock's own intoxicated brain, not to mention how his condition affected his abilities to take things any further. Two aborted attempts were enough for Sherlock to decide never to repeat the experiment in the presence of alcohol again, and he’s stopped attending these mindless gatherings, but that hasn’t stopped  people from inviting him every time another celebration is called for.

It's strange, Sherlock thinks as he crosses St Giles to the kebab van, to consider that after almost a year at uni, he's still not part of anything, but he's also not shut out from most things, either.

“Salt and vinegar?” the bearded man asks when Sherlock orders his chips.

The van smells so intensely of meat and spices and saturated fat that Sherlock's stomach growls. It's been a long time since he ate, and his parents would certainly object to the fast food and its lack of nutrients, but chips are one of the few comforts that Sherlock will allow himself.

Nodding, Sherlock waits before a warm styrofoam tray is handed over to him, exchanged for a few coins. The chips are hot enough to hurt his fingers, but then he's never been one for patience.

A driver throws herself on the horn when Sherlock crosses St Giles, neglecting pay the traffic any attention.

Staying ‘safe’ is an illusion, Sherlock knows as he reaches the other side of the street, because he never feels more _threatened_ than when his mind has nothing better to chew on than the meaningless round of daily life. It's dangerous, because his brain has still not fully accepted that life cannot consist solely of problems to solve, challenges to rise to and interests to pursue. It will consume itself, and there's nothing left for Sherlock to do but watch it happen. Uni is better, but Sherlock's brain isn't. The only constants are the inconsistency of his temperament and the steady flow of obsessions, some permanent, but most fleeting.

Sherlock should take better care of himself, his father would say, but then his parents are miles and miles away and do not have to endure Sherlock's poor sleeping habits or his steadily increasing smoking habit. It's no longer their immediate problem that their youngest son dives into his newest interest with an energy that seems boundless, learning how to fence only to excel at it in record time, before spending the next three weeks hardly leaving his room, his brain too useless to see through the greyness that was waiting for him around the corner as soon as he reached his goal.

As Sherlock approaches the brick building containing the university chemistry labs, he slips out a stealthily-cut copy of his tutor’s key and heads for his favourite lab.

When he was new to Oxford, he’d spend all his waking time exploring the town, the libraries, the buildings and all their different equipment, too eager in his mapping of all the possibilities that his new life as a student offered to stick to anything for long, but after a few weeks he'd found himself returning to the lab most nights after even the most eager students had left the building. In the darkness and the silence of the abandoned laboratories Sherlock could focus on testing his ideas, trying new variations of experiments that first-year students would only be allowed to read about. Sherlock has always preferred the more empirical approach to all science, and having already taken in everything of interest that his first-year studies offer, he he finds himself bored once again. Starting his university studies has been a brief respite from the constant under-stimulation that was his life, but it only worked for so long.

Now Sherlock spends the compulsory lectures thinking about everything but what's being said, except when he finds something on which he needs to correct their lecturer. He’s taken up fencing and started studying Latin during the lectures in order to escape the tedium of hearing about things that are simple enough that Sherlock draws his conclusion long before the entire problem is presented to the class, who all act like it’s some kind of challenge to keep up with the studies. The only real challenge is to keep motivating himself to get out of bed day after day, if he even made it to bed the night before.

Everything's too easy, Sherlock thinks as he turns the Bunsen burner on. It's too easy, and that makes it almost impossible to endure.

He doesn't bother with safety goggles, but knowing from experience just how distasteful the smell of acid burning skin is, he does put on his gloves before pouring a colorless liquid into the Erlenmeyer flask, where it mixes with the compound he's already measured out.

Eating the last of the chips, Sherlock watches the flask, the way the powder is dissolved as the burner underneath heats the liquid.

There are things you can learn; things like chemistry, acting like you're someone else, fencing and Latin verbs, but there're also the things you can't learn. Things like sustaining any habits that aren't destructive, understanding the meaning behind the words others say, knowing that the greyness will not last, and how to be be… good.

Uni is better, but it's inconsequential, because Sherlock isn't better, and he is unlikely to ever be.

As the heat increases, Sherlock feels how the air he inhales starts to burn in his lungs, making each breath more shallow.

Liquid turning into gas. A metamorphosis Sherlock can understand.

And the gas that's making everything just a bit painful is only a byproduct of a chemical reaction, like so many other things that people consider painful.

It burns, and it hurts, but as Sherlock’s instincts take over and he scrambles to get to his feet, to escape the air that is impossible to breathe, the pain stops.

And not just the pain.

Everything stops, and Sherlock is no longer conscious as his head hits the tiled floor, no longer responsive to the signals from his pain receptors.

No longer responsive to anything.

 

 

It isn't that Sherlock thinks about death constantly.

It's more that he’s kept returning to the thought his entire life.

 

 

The first thing that registers is the panic.

It's an instinctive kind of panic, the sort that makes you fight for your life no matter what you might think of said life.

Sherlock isn't aware of where he is, or even who he is, but he's aware of this: he can't breathe.

In the haze and the dark, Sherlock tries to get his arms to cooperate, to get to his throat, to free his airways of whatever it is that is stopping him from inhaling, that obstructs the passage and--

His hands are too heavy to make it all the way, but there's voices in the distance, and he'll surely black out any moment, because the pain is burning away in his lungs, lungs that are…

Before the lorazepam hits his system, Sherlock's hand falls to his chest, and before he’s embedded in a drug-induced haze, he almost thinks that he can feel his chest expand under his palm.

 

 

During his first two days in the ICU, Sherlock keeps returning to the thought of death with a previously unknown intensity.

Once the tube in his throat is removed the panic decreases slightly, but breathing is still so painful that each breath makes him wish that it could be his last. He tries to rid himself of the oxygen mask that forces air into his airways, but the oxygen level outside the mask isn't enough to keep his saturation up, and the feeling of not getting enough air is more excruciating than the pain, and so he doesn't fight as the mask is replaced.

Turns out that the only thing worse than living is nearly dying, and as the pain gradually lessens, Sherlock almost wishes it wouldn't, because at least it was enough to keep him from thinking.

After three days Sherlock can concede that some things didn't go according to plan in the lab that night, and people seem to assume that it's the chemicals he's referring to.

‘A miscalculation’ or ‘an accident’ is what they call it, and Sherlock never bothers to correct them. Being perceived as imprecise is frustrating, but being seen as mentally unstable is most likely worse.

He is, however, both of those things, if the whole ordeal at the lab is anything to go by.

Crucially, he's still alive, and when Sherlock is finally allowed to leave the hospital, he knows this means he has to find a way to deal with at least one of the three other things he can now safely say that he is.

 

 *

 

“Sherlock! I never thought I'd find you here, after all that's happened. How are you?”

Sherlock finds himself smiling at his classmate, trying to recall her name. Danielle? Nathalie? Oh; _Nadine_.

“Intoxicated,” he answers, and Nadine sits down next to him on the kitchen counter, pushing a few bottles away to make room.

It's so easy to smile, suddenly. It's almost like it didn't matter if he meant it or not, because Nadine laughs at his joke, raising her beer bottle as if in a toast, and at the moment, Sherlock’s brain isn’t second-guessing everything he does.

Nadine seems genuinely curious about how Sherlock is, since Sherlock hasn't attended any lectures or tutorials for several weeks. Not since the “accident” in the lab. The consequences of his unauthorised experiments and his breaking and entering are yet to be determined, but right now the whole issue seems peripheral.

Without any studies to occupy his time, Sherlock has set out to once and for all determine what it is that causes him so much trouble with living. With a psychiatry textbook in front of him, he methodically worked his way through the diagnoses, searching for an explanation - other than his unusual intellect - for his being what he is. He's been ruthless, completely unsentimental about it all, because he’s no longer in a position where he can claim with even a trace of conviction that there isn’t anything wrong with him.

(And if he can determine what the problem is, there's also a possibility that he might be able to find a fix.)

“You don't look nearly intoxicated enough to me,” says Nadine and smiles the sloppy smile of the inebriated.

“It's simple chemistry. I'm merely better at measuring my dosage than you lot.”

That's true, but what is also true is that they're talking about different chemicals at this stage.

“Says the boy who almost got himself killed in a chemistry lab,” Nadine snorts, landing a playful slap on his thigh.

‘Almost’ being the key word here, Sherlock muses, because that's what it all comes down to; he's been ‘almost’ for far too long. Almost living followed by almost dying, neither of those being particularly pleasant. Being almost able to pass for normal… well, that might be the worst of it.

“I really am surprised to see you here,” Nadine adds as an afterthought.

Sherlock only nods, then jumps down from the counter, hearing the beat and the voices from the living room and suddenly feeling like the vibrations are benevolent, even alluring.

He doesn't dance (not like this), and he doesn't do parties. Somehow, his mind seems to have forgotten about that.

It's so easy, now that he's found the solution. It won't fix the problem, but it does make it bearable, perhaps even enjoyable.  

“We shouldn't spend the night in here,” Sherlock hears himself saying, but Nadine shakes her head, so Sherlock makes his way to the crowded living room by himself.

A few minutes is all it takes. A purchase, then the arranging of the substance before carefully inhaling it. The relief is nearly instant. A few minutes in a gritty bathroom, and suddenly the party surrounding him doesn’t make him want to cover his ears or claw his skin off or simply tell them all how completely and utterly pointless it really is. A few minutes and a dose of absurdly overpriced cocaine make things bearable the way nothing else has ever managed to do.

In his cluttered room at St John's, the psychiatry textbook that was supposed to settle this once and for all is now forgotten, because Sherlock has found the cure before he’s found a diagnosis, and the last two weeks have proven that whatever might be wrong with him, he doesn’t have to care.

It might be an unorthodox cure, but then again modern psychiatry has failed him, probably doesn't even have the means to evaluate someone with a brain both as intelligent and as… problematic as his, so unorthodox methods are all that remain.

Before, he’d promised himself that he wouldn't almost do anything again. No more almost dying. And so the next time, if there was a next time, it would be final.

Right now, that time seems very distant.

 

 

Sherlock exhales, allowing the pain to fully register before he pushes the plunger, sending the clear liquid into his bloodstream.

After a year of intravenous administration, the injection of cocaine has its own ritual. The preparation, the instruments used, the pain as the needle breaks his skin and then the relief. Sherlock has always been strangely fascinated and oddly comforted by rituals.

Sherlock knows this is not the solution to his problems with living. He wishes that he was naive enough to actually believe that it is, but that kind of rationalisation - or rather self-delusion - is not something his intellect will allow, not even after the cocaine crosses over the blood-brain barrier and things become far more… agreeable. Drugs are, however, effective when it comes to making those problems seem irrelevant. When Sherlock is high, the world is seldom dull.

Sherlock loves the way cocaine has turned out to be the perfect chemical compensation for his mental defects.

But love turns out to be a chemical defect found on the losing side, just as his brother has taken it upon himself to repeat every now and then, and Sherlock turns out to be very much on the losing side, because ending up in a rehab facility after getting sent down from Oxford cannot possibly be anything but a loss.

 

 

In hindsight, drugs might not be the best way to make life bearable even if you don’t plan on living all that long.

Two-and-a-half years spent obscuring the fact that there’s something terribly wrong with him come to an abrupt stop as Sherlock is admitted to the rehabilitation clinic for the second time in as many weeks. This time, he won’t be able to leave after three days as he did before, because this admission is not a so-called voluntary one. Sherlock knows that this is an ending, but he’s not sure if this will be the end of his days with the drugs or simply the end of his days.

He’ll just have to wait to find out if it’s possible to survive what they demand of him.

Somehow, he highly doubts it is.

 

  *

 

At rehab, the psychiatrist is insistent when it comes to making Sherlock fill out assessments, and she persists in asking him about suicidal ideation whenever they have an appointment, which in Sherlock’s opinion is far too often.

In the end, it turns out that the truth is easy to adjust on self-assessment forms, and Sherlock hasn’t displayed any kind of suicidal behaviour or ideation over the duration of his stay. Therefore, Sherlock is discharged without further ado after having completed twenty-eight excruciating days of rehab, declining both follow-up appointments and referrals to a therapist before he nods his goodbye, leaving the small office and heading back to his spartan room in the adjacent wing to collect his things.

The questions on the forms have clearly been designed for normal people, Sherlock reasons. He doesn’t particularly recognise himself in any of the ones  about suicidal ideation, because they ask him to compare things to how they were ‘before’, and Sherlock doesn’t remember a ‘before’. Death is a constant, and so are his thoughts regarding his own death.

No, there’s never been a ‘before’ the thoughts begun. And there will most likely never be an ‘after’ either.

 

 

Two single tablets.

Mycroft’s been thorough, but two Oxy tablets, hidden inside a capsule inside a shampoo bottle, have survived even Mycroft’s scrutiny. Sherlock feels the weight of them on his palm, firmly clutching the only remainder of his stash.

He’s back in his down-at-heel flat on Montague Street, debating with himself over what would be worst; having to face continued (grey, hateful) sobriety or facing the risk of having go through (burning, humiliating) withdrawal ever again.

It feels like he’s seeing his last chance of respite from himself being flushed down the toilet as the two tablets of Oxy spin around in the water before they are swallowed by the plumbing.

It’s not like they’d been his drug of choice, but suddenly Sherlock finds that he’s got no choices left to make for himself.

It’s not tears. It just tastes salty in his mouth as he rests his head against the cheap tiles of the bathroom floor.

 

 

“You’re throwing your life away,” Mycroft once coldly stated when he had happened upon Sherlock unusually high and entering his third day of sleeplessness.

Of course Sherlock knew.

He might have been high and malnourished and even a bit incoherent at that point, but it’d seemed such a pleasant way to go, and death was inevitable anyway. Might as well live a short but ultimately more bearable life.

Now, in the harsh light of a February morning, it’s clear that his younger self was right.

Sherlock stares at his hand as it lies on the mattress besides him, closing first his left eye and then his right, seeing how the perspective changes slightly. Sobriety is on its 44th day, and it’s not unbearable, because it’s… nothing.

It's not the pain from before the drugs - no, it's the dull, grey absence of any kind of pleasure.

His brain is still adjusting to lacking the additional serotonin from the cocaine and now the receptors all seem to be waiting for some free serotonin to bind to them, but his own production of the neurotransmitter will not return to its usual levels for months, perhaps even longer.

On the bed beside him, Sherlock’s index finger twitches, and he studies how a single tendon in his wrist moves under the thin, colorless skin.

Almost buried beneath one of the pillows, a thick textbook rests on the mattress. Sherlock bought it four (or was it five?) days ago on one of his rare expeditions from his flat. As he pushes the pillow to the floor, the spine of the book becomes visible from where Sherlock lies.

_Suicidology and Suicide Prevention._

At the time, getting the book and gathering more data seemed like the only way to go about it. Now, staring at the watery purple of the cover of the book, Sherlock is no longer certain about that.

Sherlock first heard the words ‘commit suicide’ at the age of eight. Listening to his mother talking to one of the neighbors, he made a note of the term, and later that day, he looked it up in the family dictionary. It wasn’t the concept of taking one’s own life that confused him, no; it was the idea that one could ‘commit’ suicide the way one might commit a crime.

This remains his opinion on the matter, and apparently, the authors of the thick textbook beside him agree. There are no mentions of suicide being immoral, but instead, there’s something far more disconcerting: research that indicates a vast majority of those either attempting or completing suicide are suffering from mental illnesses at the time of the attempt, and hence not in their right mind. While Sherlock failed to diagnose himself with anything definitive prior to rehab, he seems to be experiencing a textbook example of the depression that is supposed to follow cocaine withdrawal.

Sherlock turns the book towards himself, but doesn’t make any attempt to open it. In the dim evening light of his flat, he wouldn’t be able to make out the words. Even more frustratingly, he doubts that he would have enough focus to read even a simple textbook on questionable scientific findings about human nature.

Questionable, but nonetheless apposite.

Death - at least his own death - ought to be rational. Mental illness is, per definition, not rational. Hence, that shouldn’t be allowed to be the thing that kills him. Sherlock himself should be what kills him, but he can’t disregard the fact that he is currently more than a bit affected by a substance-induced depression.

If one has to die, one should at least avoid doing so like a finch crashing into a window, unable to see what is right in front of it, before falling to the pavement on a dull side-street. There are better ways, and better reasons, and Sherlock refuses to see this notion as sentimental, because a person is, after all, a sum of actions and their consequences.

With a sigh, Sherlock pulls himself up to sit on his bed. The sudden movement leaves him dizzy, his blood pressure quickly adjusting to the new position. Everything around him seems slightly distorted.

This, Sherlock concludes, would be a dull place to die. And his current state is, undeniably, not the most rational.

Picking up a few discarded clothes to put on, Sherlock makes his way to the bathroom.

He needs to be able to make a rational decision about his own potential death, but unfortunately, he’s in no fit state for rational decisions at the moment. So however futile it might seem, he needs to do something about said state.

A shower won’t make anything even remotely better, and getting himself something to eat seems pointless when his appetite is more or less extinguished, but he will do it, because not doing so would be even more pointless.

He’ll give himself a few more days.

 

 

Sherlock knows he lacks the data to form an opinion on death, but still it seems like a preferable option. He knows what it’s like to live, after all, and that experience has yet to impress him.

He might not know what it would be like not to be alive, but he’s becoming increasingly sure it would be better than this.

Making his way past cheap tat shops and restaurants wafting obnoxious smells onto the street, Sherlock thinks about statistical probability. Of those who attempt suicide for the first time, only fifteen percent will later die at their own hand. The rest will live to eventually die from something else.

Sherlock has nearly died from direct or indirect attempts to kill himself twice during his twenty-one years. In addition to that, he’s ended up in the A&E three times due to nearly overdosing.His track record would suggest that he’s better at surviving than he is at actually living. Given that he's also displaying most of the risk factors for people who will complete a suicide, the chances - or risk - of his life eventually ending any other way are probably lower than the promised eighty-five percent.

He does, however, undeniably possess one of the protective factors the textbook mentioned: problem-solving ability. Sherlock is nothing if not both capable and determined to solve each and every problem he finds interesting enough.

It seems ironic that one of those problems is the potential irrationality of his own pending decision to die by his own volition.

In order to be able to make an informed decision on the matter, he needs to at least temporarily ameliorate the cause of his increased fixation on death, namely the substance-induced depression even he will admit to having. Unfortunately, it's been weeks, and he still feels like he's just acting out the part of someone not severely depressed and in need of a hit.

He’s ended up here.

‘Here’ is a small pharmacy. He first started coming to get antacids for his recently-acquired ulcer, but lately the pharmacy has provided something far more useful; distraction in the form of a tiny puzzle.

“That can't be right,” the manager says, her shoulders squaring up as if in defence.

“Of course I'm right,” Sherlock says, and for the first time in months he actually believes it. “Cross-check the inventory with his schedule. If your employee was working in connection to the all the occasions when narcotics were unaccounted for, you ought to be able to draw a simple conclusion.”

“Have you been buying from him? Has he been selling?” Suddenly the woman behind the counter looks at him like she’s on the verge of calling the police. Sherlock just lifts his eyebrow, aware that he looks the part, still malnourished and with his skin dark under his eyes and his hair overdue for a shower. Part of him wishes it was due to the drugs. At least then he would have some brief moments of bliss in the midst of his decay.

“He’s not stealing enough to sell. Just look at the man, he’s clearly a benzo addict! One would think a pharmacist would know the signs.”

When Sherlock glances pointedly at the box of antacids waiting on the counter between them, the manager automatically picks it up and finally deposits it in the bag. Then, too caught up in her own thoughts, she fails to hand it over to her customer, who snags the bag from her and gives a short nod before turning towards the door.

Before he’s even out of the pharmacy, Sherlock feels something vaguely like a smile form on his lips, but the sensation is so foreign that he almost doubts it's really there.

A mundane little puzzle, really. A few observations that had formed a pattern. It happens to him all the time, and it's one of the things in his mind that's both a curse and a blessing. Usually, he doesn't voice his observations, not anymore, because school did teach him one thing: people did not take to them kindly.

That doesn't matter now. What matters is this: sharing that deductions was the highpoint of his entire month.

Crimes, Sherlock decides, are not boring.

Heading back towards Montague Street, he pops one of the antacids out in his palm. If he’s walking just a bit faster than he did before, well; it has nothing to do with what just happened.

In Sherlock's brain, synapses are suddenly firing at almost their normal velocity, and another pattern emerges: crimes are not boring, and solving them is potentially dangerous. And Sherlock never feels more alive than he does when he's just one misstep from death.

If the possibility of death is inconsequential, or even desirable, then there’s no reason not to risk his own life for the sake of something more substantial than his own current mental instability.

He won’t kill himself, but that doesn’t mean he has to try very hard not to get himself killed. He can solve puzzles and put himself in harm’s way, because harm isn’t really harmful when you’ve been waiting for it your entire life. And perhaps, maybe just once, he will manage to do something worthwhile. It’s a vague idea, and it’s a compromise, but at least it’s not entirely bleak. In fact, he can’t really lose. Either way, he won’t be stuck in the greyness of the constant, unnerving, mind-numbing in-betweens for too long.

And perhaps it won’t even be boring.

 

 * 

 

The led pipe misses his temple by only half an inch.

There’s no time to revel in the surge of adrenaline, because a  smuggler is still  trying, rather competently, to end Sherlock’s life.

As the lead pipe clunks loudly against the concrete floor, she gets hold of Sherlock’s arm. He manages to pull it back in such a sudden movement that she’s caught by surprise, and still holding onto his arm, her body is flung to the tiled wall behind him. He hears the breath being knocked out of her briefly, and knows he only has a second or two to act. Quickly, he jerks his own arm free and twists hers up against her back until a scream and a crack tells him that she’s at least partially incapacitated.

Picking up the lead pipe from the floor next to him, he takes a few steps back as he watches the woman in front of him sink down against the wall, protecting her arm as her face contracts in pain.

In Sherlock’s mind, things are almost quiet as he feels his heartbeat pulse throughout his entire body. He’s narrowly escaped death, and somehow that feeling never seems to build tolerance.

As he hears the footsteps of the approaching policemen, Sherlock allows his breathing to slow down further, forbidding any of the sensations currently roaming through his body to surface as the door to the warehouse opens.

He’s 27 years old, busy inventing his own job and he’s finally found his perfect drug.

Risking his life is doubtlessly good for his ability to live.

Somewhere in the back of his mind, he can hear the lyrics to a song he heard hundreds of times in rehab, as the girl in the room next to him kept playing the same CD on repeat all day every day.

_So close to dying that I finally can start living._

It’s sentimental, but as he feels the heavy gaze of the newly-minted DI land upon him and sees how the man’s face scrunches up into an expression of utter resignation as he recognises who’s holding the led pipe, Sherlock acknowledges that there might be some truth to the lyrics. What started as a way to stifle his suicidality has turned out to be the perfect amalgamation of several of his skills. With his abilities to see patterns in everything paired with the only useful thing that came out of rehab, an interest in the science of human psychology, Sherlock’s become rather apt at observing and deducing other people’s motives.

His own motivation is plain enough, even to himself; he’s postponing the reflux of greyness case by case, day by day.

He offers the DI a polite smile, handing him the pipe before wiping his hands against his coat to rid them of any dirt.

“Are you out of your mind?” the man shouts at him after a few moments of stunned silence, looking at the metal in his hand.

“Please! I don’t need a weapon to incapacitate one smuggler,” Sherlock retorts. “The led pipe you’re holding was meant to go into my skull, not hers.”

“And we all wish it’d got there,” one of the young officers mumbles under her breath, but Sherlock can still make the words out.

“You could have been bloody killed!” the DI exclaims, rubbing the fingers of his free hand against the bridge of his nose.

As it turns out, not being afraid of dying is something of an advantage when it comes to crime solving as a career path. Instead of walking on railings to balance his constant ambivalence over ending it all, Sherlock chases suspects and risks his life investigating crimes. At times, he’ll put himself into harm’s way simply because he can’t stand the idea of keeping on living, but most of the time he does it simply because he’s curious and will stop at nothing to solve the puzzle in front of him.

And while Sherlock still might not always want to live, he can often find himself  die either.

“I hardly think so. This would be a far too dull place to die in, wouldn’t you say?”

 

*

 

While the in-betweens are somewhat less bothersome these days, they are nonetheless still a recurrent phenomenon.

It’s during one of the in-betweens that Sherlock meets John Watson.

“Well, bit different from my day,” Sherlock hears a pragmatic voice say before he turns around to see Mike Stamford with a military man holding a cane and taking in the new lab equipment. Sherlock has just managed to find the final bit of evidence needed to arrest a suspect, given that said suspect owns a green ladder that matches the color fragments he’s just identified.

When Molly exits the room a minute later, hopefully to get him some coffee, Sherlock’s already made up his mind about the man with the psychosomatic limp and the too-deep lines in his face.

“How do you feel about the violin?”

It’s simple, really; while Sherlock might be getting better at living, the man whose phone Sherlock’s currently tapping away at isn’t, and Sherlock does so love to provide the answers to problems that others can’t solve. He decides that he will provide John Watson with what he’s currently missing; the will to live.

 _Could be dangerous_ , he texts John the next day, and John shows up an hour later.

As they run through the streets of Soho, Sherlock casts a fleeting thought to the book on suicidology that has yet to be unpacked in their new home at Baker Street, and marvels over how ‘danger’ wasn’t mentioned as a possible intervention for suicide prevention. Under the dim streetlights, with a steady stream of adrenaline flooding his bloodstream as they chase a taxi down D’Arblay Street, it’s clear to see that Sherlock isn’t the only one kept alive by this simple, effective measure.

It might not be the best long-term solution to the problem, but as with all these things, it seems Sherlock will simply have to live to see.

That prospect seems almost palatable at present.

 

 * 

 

Sherlock’s been balancing on railings for his entire life. It’s never felt quite like this.

His hand is shaking as he fumbles for his phone in his coat pocket. The call will be his farewell to John, no matter if he survives the next few minutes or not.

It’s only been two years since he decided that exposure to danger was likely the best way to counteract suicidality in the worn, tired man now on the other end of the phone. As it turns out, the arrangement has proved to be both far more problematic and far more rewarding than Sherlock anticipated.

But living has never come easily to Sherlock, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that his temporary relief ends like this.

The surprise is that it managed to last as long as it did.

“Leave a note when?”

Whatever it will do to John, this is the only way.

In a building a bit further down the street, his brother is working steadily to ensure that Sherlock’s odds of survival are kept as high as possible. At Baker Street, Mrs Hudson must still be confused over her tenant’s strange behaviour. Somewhere in London, Lestrade is trying to solve some mundane crime that Sherlock couldn’t be bothered with.

On the roof of Barts, Sherlock Holmes realises, with a twist in his stomach, that for the first time ever he wholeheartedly cares whether or not he’ll live.

It’s ironic, but then life often is, he concludes.

Dropping his phone, Sherlock gazes across the roofs of London and spreads his arms wide. He leans out into the unknown, and then he’s falling.

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> When it comes to Sherlock’s strategy to handle his own suicidality towards the end of this fic, I’ll just quote Bright Eyes once more (it’s my constant background noise for this story); “it’s not something I’d recommend, but it is one way to live”. 
> 
> And it’s often like that in life - it’s not the things one would expect that makes someone else decide to give life some more time, or perhaps to give themselves another chance. When it comes to how you handle the struggle to keep on living, there are no absolute truths or rights and wrongs, only life and what you make of it.
> 
> (That said, don't ever feel like you have to make it all alone, the way Sherlock did. You don't. Talking about does -despite what one might feel about the concept - help. At least, that is my opinion as a clinican but also that of current ressearch on suicidology.)


End file.
